A satellite-derived database for stand-replacing windthrow events in boreal forests of European Russia in 1986–2017
The GIS database contains the data of stand-replacing windthrow areas in the forest zone of the European Russia (ER) for the 1986–2017 period, and the ArcGIS 10.1/10.2 and Qgis 3* projects to view and analyze the data. The database contains three shapefiles (.shp), corresponding to three hierarchical levels of the data:
• “Elementary damaged area”, that is a single-part polygon of wind-damaged forest;
• “Windthrow”, that represent a group of closely spaced forest disturbances, i.e., a multipart polygon, associated with one storm event;
• “Storm event track”, that is a cluster of windthrow areas with identical direction and having the same date (or date range) of occurrence, which was most likely induced by one convective or non-convective storm.
The key fields ID and storm_ID associates each damaged area with the features in the datasets of windthrows and storm event tracks respectively using one-to-many relation. A single value “‒9999” was used for storing NoData in all fields of the attribute table. All data and projects have WGS 1984 coordinate system (without projection).
Delineation of windthrow areas was based on the full archive of Landsat images and two Landsat-derived products on forest cover change, namely the Global Forest Change and the Eastern’ Europe Forest Cover Change. Subsequent verification and analysis of each windthrow was carried out to determine a type of storm events with a degree of event certainty, dates (date ranges) and time (time ranges) of an event, windthrow geometrical characteristics. The database contains 102,747 elementary areas of damaged forest that were combined into 700 windthrow areas caused by 486 convective or non-convective storm events. The database includes stand-replacing windthrow only, which an area > 5 ha or > 25 ha for events caused by tornadoes or other storms, respectively. Additional information contained weather station reports and event description from media sources is also provided..
The compiled database provides a valuable source of spatial and temporal information on windthrows in the ER and can be successfully used both in forestry and severe storm studies.
